Publisher: McClellan isn't alleging Bush took part in 'conspiracy to mislead'

A bombshell excerpt from a new book by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was not intended as an allegation that President Bush helped to mislead the public about the outing of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame, the book's publisher told CNN.

"I just got off the phone with the publisher of McClellan's new book, and he tells me that McClellan does not charge in the book that the president himself was involved in any kind of conspiracy to mislead the public," reported CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin. "But of course, in the publisher's words, 'Scott did go out to take bullets without the proper flak jacket on.'"

In a series of 2003 press conferences, the former top White House spokesman had maintained that neither then-advisor Karl Rove nor Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, had been involved in the leaking of Plame's identity as a CIA agent. Yellin pointed to a previous interview with Larry King Live, in which McClellan suggested that both he and the president had been mislead about the Plame affair.

"It was also what the president believed at the time based on assurances we were both given," McClellan had told King. "Knowing what I know today, I would have never said that back then...I said that those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. I did speak directly with them and I was careful about the way I phrased it at them time -- even though I believed what they had told me to be the truth."

Developing...

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Publisher_McClellan_didnt_have_proper_flak_1121.html

I was waiting for Scotty to start backpedaling madly!

there no there there? Fuckin' scotty..I knew it.

:eyes:

Mindfuckingboggling. I KNEW this story would take a 'nothing to see here' spin.

Hey Scottymouth, too late idiot. You can't backpedal on a lie over a lie. Nice try.

And CNN...just making the story more believable by spinning it IMO.

"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff, and the president himself."

How the hell does that NOT imply a conspiracy? He better rewrite that paragraph if he's saying there wasn't a conspiracy now.

If you recall even Jimmy Carter retracted a statement he made against Bush.

Don't you just love wiretapping and extortion? :)

How predictable. :eyes:

It was on NPR this morning. If anything, the spin and lies are just placing emphasis on and reinforcing the premise of the original quote!

Scotty went out and lied. But he didn't know he was lying, because he believed that the people telling him the lies were telling the truth, and he didn't inquire too closely about that, for reasons that are unspecified. Certainly, a number of the questions that were swirling around his moon-faced little head had to alert Scotty that he might not be communicating the whole truth in this matter.

But we'll put that aside.

Scotty didn't know he was being fed lies, so he was just repeating what he was told. But apparently, the people above him feeding him the lies weren't really lying, even though they could see that everyone was drawing a totally erroneous conclusion, which was that no one was lying. It was the erroneous conclusion that was at fault, not the lie that led to that conclusion. It just happened that the lie allowed people to believe that nobody in the White House was carrying on treasonable activities, a happy coincidence that had nothing to do with anyone misleading Scotty or lying to the American people.

If the media pundits can make endless hay out of chortling over what the meaning of "is" is (a question that is not self-answering, no matter how much you chortle over it), how do they justify their complete bafflement over being able to ascertain if anyone in this episode is lying?

Is anyone (besides the willing dupes at CNN and Fox) believing a word of this?

Unfortunately lying while not under oath is not punishable. How did Snotty come to know that he had been duped into lying? Has he learned it from the scooter trial? We need the Judiciary commitee to ask some questions under oath.
I believe the little scum is a treasonous loyalist. He was given this assignment by pigboy to distract from the * veto's.
This Gannon idol, would not do this to revenge his mother,hell he would implicate her. One mistake the pigboy made was in timing. This is six months from publication. This may be a sign that the treasonous rove had to stretch for this distraction.

if they can castrate any opposition to their crimes, they weren't worried about scott mcclellan

When did he discover he had been mislead, before or after he testified to the Grand Jury? Why didn't anyone at anytime come forth and tell the public that they had been mislead? All these GOP crocodile tears always come too late. They all took part in the crime. They all subverted the democracy they swore to defend. The held America down...